【10.03.01 纽约时报】Chinese Editorials Assail a Government System

青蛙小王子

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/asia/02china.html
BEIJING — In a country where the press is tightly managed by the state, the identical editorials that appeared Monday in more than a dozen publications calling for reform of China’s onerous household registration system were noteworthy.
“China has suffered for a long time under the hukou system!” the editorials declared, using the Chinese term for the residency permits that tie government benefits to a person’s registered hometown. “We believe in people born to be free and people possessing the right to migrate freely!”
But a few hours later, the editorials had largely vanished from the Internet, presumably erased by a government that is wary of abandoning a 50-year-old system that many critics say has fed the surging gap between China’s urban and rural population.
The short-lived proclamations, published by a mix of 13 big-city newspapers, financial publications and regional dailies, were a coordinated act of bravado on an issue that has bedeviled the Communist Party since Mao established the hukou system to prevent famine-stricken peasants from flooding the wealthier cities.
The system, though much relaxed in recent years, ties people to their parents’ hometown, where their birth has to be registered. Many government services, like schooling and police protection, are tied to people’s hukou, and the rules for shifting a hukou from one place to another are highly restrictive.
Despite the rules, hundreds of millions of the rural poor have migrated to cities to build the highways and office towers that have transformed China. But they do not have the same rights as local residents, and they have difficulty putting their children in schools or getting medical care. If they lose their jobs, the police often pressure them to return to their hometowns.
The educated and the rich have found ways to circumvent the restrictions. An advanced degree can lead to a coveted urban permit. When all else fails, a large sum of cash in the right pocket will do the trick.
The problem was highlighted last month in Beijing when education officials announced that 30 “unauthorized” schools serving about 20,000 migrant children would have to give way for redevelopment. Experts estimate that as many as 250,000 children born in the capital in recent years have no legal right to a public education.
The editorials were published just days before the start of China’s annual legislative and advisory sessions, where significant reforms favored by the party hierarchy are often discussed. While overhauling the country’s household registration system is often debated — and the system has been watered down substantially since Mao’s day — it remains formally on the books.
Fei-Ling Wang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has studied the hukou system, expressed doubt that it would change anytime soon. Stability-minded officials are reluctant to give up a powerful mechanism of control, he said, and even if they enjoy the low-cost labor, urban elites are wary of sharing their cities with millions of peasants.
Government officials frequently credit the household permit system with keeping China free of the urban slums that plague other developing countries.
“There’s a strong push for reform, but there’s also a tremendous resistance among vested interests,” Mr. Wang said. “To change it would directly impact on the ruling foundation of the Chinese Communist Party.”
But those same leaders, he points out, recognize that the growing inequalities fueled by the system could one day lead to public unrest.
The editorials seemed to suggest as much with language redolent of China’s revolutionary past. “The system is anachronistic and troubling our great masses to this day,” they said. “It has reached a point that people’s anger cannot be quelled unless there is reform of the system.”

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